


Rachel Duncan's Familiar Face

by ellisinprogress1



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25132006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellisinprogress1/pseuds/ellisinprogress1
Summary: Rachel Duncan makes me sad. The last scene with her in the car with Felix always makes me cry and it makes me think that theres a tiny peice of her that wants to be a part of what the others have. This is based on that.
Kudos: 10





	Rachel Duncan's Familiar Face

**Author's Note:**

> this might be crap i don't know. all i know is that i love rachel

Rachel Duncan pulls her hair up into a tight bun, neat, no flyaway pieces. She doesn't remember the last time she'd been able to do that, she remembered when her hair was long enough, but she doesn't remember actually doing it. She's surprised she even knows how - she scoffs at herself in the mirror. Of course she knows how.

The lights are dark in the rest of the apartment. She had left the bathroom door open while she got ready for bed. She knew she was alone, and safe, but it comforted her a little to have a way to escape when- if she needed to.  
Rachel doesn't touch her eye to remove it. The doctor had told her that she must take it out at night and that she could put it back in again when she woke up. He had given her a little box to keep it in while she slept. She had dropped it in there with a little _plink_ as it hit the plastic, and clicked the lid shut and gone to bed. She had lay in the dark, a gaping hole in her face, and then walked into the bathroom and stared in the mirror. A foreign face had stared back at her. So, she pushed the cold plastic back into place. Looking in the mirror then she saw one face stare back at her. The same familiar one she had seen day after day. The same familiar face she had seen in lab reports and on so many documents. The same familiar face that stared back at her from number tags and from autopsy tables in cold rooms with too much white in them. The same familiar face she saw when she looked in the mirror now. 

Rachel Duncan made sure never to change her face again. But still she hated the way that face stared back at her. She hated that she could see so many other people's faces in hers. She hated that what she could see wasn't her mouth or her nose or her cheeks or her teeth. But it was her eyes. She can't loose that.

She runs her fingers over the thin bracelet on her wrist, straightening it out. The clasp Kira had given her had broken, so Rachel took a button and fixed the bracelet. She was sitting at her computer, the broken bracelet curling in her hand. She had typed out an email to Sarah, asking how she was doing and requesting Kira to send a new bracelet. Hollow niceties to Sarah surrounded raw feelings, they didn't hide the painful words enough, so she deleted it all before she made the mistake of hitting _send_.  
Instead she carefully untied the broken clasp and put a button in its place. The black button looked out of place, messy. But it kept the bracelet on, which was all that mattered. 

Rachel wonders why she cares so much about the bracelet, why she went to so much trouble to fix it. She knows it doesn't mean much, it might even be forgotten on Kira's part. Not on Rachel's.  
She blinks away the tears in her eyes and goes to her room, turning the light off as she leaves, leaving the door open. She sits on the edge of her bed. She has been told that she should let herself cry. She doesn't really remember by who. Some DYAD therapist probably. It had been a long time since they stopped trying to _fix_ her, eventually they just let her feel like that, all prickly and broken. She doesn't know what made her cry when she was young. Maybe not knowing. That's what making her cry now. 

She looks down at her bloody thumbs, the red begins to blur as tears spill onto her face. She realizes that she must have been drawing blood without even thinking about it. She has gotten so good at hiding it from others that she managed to hide it from herself. A humorless laugh catches at her throat.  
The plastic in her eye socket is hurting her while she's crying. She still doesn't take it out. She waits to stop crying. She waits for her face to stop hurting. She waits to fall asleep, knowing that, at least in the dark there's no way for her to see that her familiar face doesn't look like Rachel Duncan's.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! let me know what you think :)


End file.
